Answer
The price of the car before taxes is $22,500.
Work Step by Step
First, we need to define our unknown. What we want to find out the price of the car before taxes, which we shall designate as $x$: This is our unknown.
We will need to add the amount of the tax to the price of the car before taxes to get the final price of $23,850$ dollars.
The tax is $6$%, so the amount of taxes added to the price of the car can be given by the expression (6%)$(x)$. We cannot work with percentages, so we change the percent into a decimal. We do this by dividing the percentage by $100$ to get rid of the percentage sign. We now have the percentage changed to the decimal $0.06$.
We can now set up the following equation to find the price of the car before the sales tax was added:
$$x + 0.06x = 23,850$$
We combine like terms:
$$1.06x = 23,850$$
To solve for $x$, we divide both sides of the equation by $1.06$:
$$x = 22,500$$
The price of the car before taxes is $22,500.
